Dr Vince Cable was once a Glasgow Labour Councillor. Not always a term of approbation, I know. One opponent of Home Rule chastised me once by asking why I was so keen on a Scottish parliament.
"It would be full of Glasgow councillors and Edinburgh lawyers," she said. To which the best reply I could think of was that it would be worse with Edinburgh councillors and Glasgow lawyers. In fact, as it has turned out, it's much worse than that. Cumbernauld councillors and Pitlochry lawyers maybe.
Cable, on the other hand, became a power in the land when he was articulating his critique of the banks - Scottish bankers to the fore - and warning that we were heading for a crash long before any other politics frontliner.
I know because he was regularly doing it on my radio show. Even as a minister, his foolish claim to undercover reporters that he was "at war with Rupert Murdoch" probably caused a cheer throughout the land, following as it did after a long period of New Labour at the feet of Rupert Murdoch. Back on my show last Friday, I was trying to talk Vince down off the ledge he's now stuck on.
The Con-Dem coalition will soon reach pre-Falklands Thatcher depths of unpopularity. A rally in London yesterday in support of their spending cuts attracted 350 people, most of them the well-heeled of Notting Hill.
But the Liberal-Democrash of May 5 when they lost 863 councillors in England and were massacred in the Scottish - where they were thrashed even by me! - and Welsh elections, together with opinion polls putting them at less than half of the previous general election score (itself a disappointment), show that it's the Libs wot are taking most of the blame.
People know it's the same old Tories but that it couldn't be happening but for the Lib-Dems.
Chris Huhne looked like he'd be the first to walk from the Government but now his life looks like a car crash. Anyway, it's Cable who has the nuclear option. If he walks, the Government falls. He's getting his boots on, I think. And those boots are made for walking.